Best 'Wordle' starting word? Step up your game today., 2024

👋 Hey, you! Ready for some Wordle fun? If you've landed here, it's Wordle time! We've got your daily scoop of hints and tips to unravel today's mystery word.

Just want the answer without the adventure? No worries! Skip to the bottom for today's Wordle solution. But if you're up for the challenge and want to crack the code on your own, stick around. We've got some clues, tips, and strategies coming your way. Let the Wordle games begin! 🎉

Give your 'Wordle' session a boost today with these words.Can't get enough of Wordle?
Try Mashable's free version now So at a very basic level, any five-letter combination that helps you rule out more vowels early is going to trim down the galaxy of possible answers. With that basic reality in mind, we can immediately pick out a few ideal starting words There are others, but ADIEU, AUDIO, and OUIJA all cover four vowels. You won't know if any yellow or green letters appear twice, say if the answer is "sweet" or "radar," but you can at least spot some critical letters right at the start. Credit: Brandon Bell / Staff via Getty Images That's good enough for most people. Starting with vowel-heavy words will give you an edge with Wordle's puzzle-solving every time. But it's also not that simple, since not every letter is created equally. Yes, vowels appear in basically every word, but some are more or less common. The same goes for consonants. There's also the Wordle dictionary. There are more than 10,000 words the game will recognize as allowable guesses, but there's a much smaller list of words — only a few thousand — that qualify as possible answers. The NYT even trimmed down that answer list after it acquired Wordle. So while you could use a more obscure word like AUREI (the plural form of aureus, an ancient Roman gold coin, for those who are curious!) as a guess, it's not going to be the day's answer. If going vowel-heavy isn't enough and you want to cover some of the more common consonants as well, RAISE is an ideal starting word since it covers the three most common vowels and the two most common consonants as they appear in dictionaries. 14 Wordle clones: Because one Wordle a day just isn't enough Mashable Top Stories Stay connected with the hottest stories of the day and the latest entertainment news. Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories newsletter Loading... Sign Me Up By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! For those who don't want to risk feeling like they're cheating Wordle, you might want to stop reading here. You can use the strategies and ways of thinking above to give yourself an edge in every day's new puzzle, and that's plenty for most players. For those who want to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, however, there's an excellent video from Grant Sanderson, a mathematician and computer scientist who goes by 3Blue1Brown on YouTube. Sanderson applied his knowledge of "information theory" to Wordle, and he coded some testing programs that measure things like letter frequency to determine the best of the best starting words. It's a dense 30 minutes of explanation that's heavy on the math talk, but Sanderson's friendly demeanor and willingness to take the time necessary to break down complex ideas for viewers makes it a fascinating watch. In this initial video from Sanderson (you didn't think it was going to be as easy as one video, did you?), the ultimate takeaway leaves us with CRANE as the best Wordle starting word. But it's not that simple. Because Sanderson's breakdown focuses on letter frequency, CRANE is just the first stage of information gathering. It's only the "best" if you use what you know about the right and wrong letters in that first word to inform a perfect second guess. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Is your head swimming yet? Do you wish you'd just tapped out after the first section?? That's where I'm at! But wait, we're not even done yet. A week after the above video post, Sanderson dropped another one, titled "Oh, wait, actually the best Wordle opener is not 'crane'...." It turns out, there was a slight bug in his original test program. He says right up front that the bug "affects a very small percentage of cases," so it doesn't undermine the substantive lessons from the first video. Without getting into the heavy math, the bug relates specifically to answers that have multiples of the same letter, and how Wordle handles that. Sanderson felt the need to put out a second video because, while "very little of substance actually changes" from the original video, the final conclusion relating to optimal starting word is affected. The same caveat from before applies here as well: An optimal starting word is only as good as how the guess that follows uses the information gleaned from the first one. With that context in mind, Sanderson's amended ideal starting word is SALET (which is an alternate spelling for "sallet," a type of helmet worn during the Middle Ages #themoreyouknow), though TRACE and CRATE work nearly as well. Especially since both of those latter options are potential Wordle answers.

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Honestly, one of the most important takeaways from all these dives down math-y rabbit holes is the notion I mentioned above: Your first guess is only strong in the context of the guesses that follow. That's the whole game of Wordle in the end: A single guess provides you with information that you then need to use to narrow down the list of subsequent guesses. Wordle-obsessed? These are the best word games to play IRL. But! (Yeah, we're not done here.) There's another school of thought on how to approach solving Wordle. Instead of playing the game as intended and using each previous guess to inform the next one, you instead stick to the letter frequency game and try to rule out the most common letters, consonants and vowels both, up front, irrespective of any clues you pick up. This approach effectively "wastes" your starting stretch of guesses on locked-in choices that are meant to narrow down the number of possible letters you have to work with. Just know that if you play Wordle in "hard mode," this strategy won't work, since each successive guess needs to include any letters that are confirmed to be in the answer by the previous guess. As the top commenter on Sanderson's original video legendarily notes: "Interesting video, real good stuff. Gonna keep using PENIS but this was really cool and informative!" For those who want to skip the long and winding road into math-land, YouTuber Bentellect has a short, sweet breakdown of his starting strategy. So RATIO first, then MENDS, then LUCKY. That's it. With those three choices, you'll have slimmed down the list of possible letters to the point that figuring out the answer with your final guesses becomes significantly easier. It's not a surefire winning strategy for every day's puzzle. I'm not sure there is one, and even if there is, knowing it would essentially break the game. Mashable's own Wordle expert Caitlin Welsh prefers a different three-word starter combination: SCALY, GUIDE, and THORN. The premise is the same though: Caitlin, like Bentellect, is narrowing down the list of possible letters that could appear in the answer by casting the widest net possible, alphabetically speaking, with her first three guesses. 14 of the best 'Wordle' clones, because one word a day isn't enough So there you have it. There's no single perfect starting guess for Wordle. There's a whole spectrum of them, along with a long list of caveats that basically boil down to: How much do you want to break the game? I said it at the start and I'll say it again: Stream of consciousness is the way to go. Use Wordle like I do, as a meditative brain-bender to loosen up those thinking muscles at the start of your day. For those who want to win at any cost, though, hopefully this extended rundown of what works best will get you closer to climbing that daily streak into the triple digits. Not the day you're after? Here's the answer to yesterday's Wordle. Topics Gaming Wordle

Tips:Were the hints and answers above helpful to you? Did you guess correctly?
Feel free to leave a comment in the section below, and I wish you good luck!

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ABOUT WORLDLE

Wordle is a simple word-guessing game that tasks players with solving a five-word puzzle using letter position clues. Wordle presents the player with six rows of five empty boxes. Simply enter a random five-letter word and the website highlights certain letters in green if they are correct, yellow if they are correct but in the wrong spot, or grey if they are not in the word at all. With this information, players need to try to figure out the word within the six guesses to be successful.

How To Play Wordle?